"Domestic Violence: a City Responds," a special reporting project in the Fall 2012 edition of the San Francisco Public Press, exposes holes in the tracking of criminal cases and the rate of prosecution for abuse within the home. The issue made headlines this year with a contentious criminal case against Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi. But we found that the District Attorney's Office prosecutes fewer cases per capita than in any county in the Bay Area, and police say they cannot be sure of the accuracy of at least eight years of investigative records. The project will roll out online through early October.

Domestic Violence

As statistics go from tick marks to laptops, police struggle to make sense of trends

The San Francisco Police Department cannot precisely measure the number of domestic violence cases it handled before 2011, because investigators in the Special Victims Unit hand-tallied monthly records, and used changing and inconsistently understood categories of crimes. This story appeared as part of a special report on domestic violence in the Fall 2012 print edition of the San Francisco Public Press.

Far fewer charged than across the region, even with strongly worded ‘no-drop’ guidelines

Though San Francisco’s so-called “no-drop” policy requires pressing domestic violence charges when evidence is sufficient to convict, the District Attorney’s Office pursued just 28 percent of cases through to trial or plea bargaining over the last 6 years. This story appeared as part of a special report on domestic violence in the Fall 2012 print edition of the San Francisco Public Press.

Football players have recently made the news for allegedly assaulting their romantic partners. But both inside and out of sports, this type of crime often goes unpunished because victims refuse to cooperate — a problem that San Francisco City Hall continues to grapple with.

The high-profile murder of Claire Joyce Tempongko more than 12 years ago showed just how ineffective the city was at dealing with domestic violence cases, spurring an investigation of the city's enforcement of domestic violence policy. Now the state Supreme Court has reinstated the second-degree murder conviction of her ex-boyfriend.

This story appeared in the Spring print edition of the San Francisco Public Press.

Nine months after the San Francisco Police Department fully implemented a new digitized case management system, inspectors were still finding as many as 20 domestic violence cases per month that were not immediately referred to the Special Victims Unit for investigation, said a lieutenant in charge of the domestic violence team.

Supervisor Eric Mar Monday unveiled new efforts to raise awareness about domestic violence. Working with the Department on the Status of Women, Mar focused on working through the city’s workforce to educate the public and to help those city employees who are victims themselves.

Orchid Pusey, interim director of the Asian Women's Shelter in San Francisco, says cultural differences can have a big influence on the attitudes and responses to domestic violence. She talked with San Francisco Public Press reporter Ruth Tam about the challenges facing service providers in the city. This story appeared as part of a special report on domestic violence in the Fall 2012 print edition of the San Francisco Public Press.

As the city’s Ethics Commission debated whether Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi was fit to hold his elected position this past June, the complex game of personality, politics and procedure eclipsed larger policy questions about the city’s approach to handling thousands of cases of domestic violence each year. But advocates for victims said the hearings generated wider awareness of the problem of domestic violence.

San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón said he is looking into why office’s prosecutions for domestic violence crimes was the lowest per capita in the Bay Area. His remarks came after a special report in the San Francisco Public Press on the handling of such cases by police and prosecutors.

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